BlackBerry Outage Hits Europe, Middle East, Africa

CP
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By LuAnn LaSalle, The Canadian Press

Posted:
09/21/2012 6:58 am EDT
Updated:
11/21/2012 5:12 am EST

Thorsten Heins, President and CEO of Research in Motion (RIM), speaks at the company Annual General Meeting in Waterloo, Ontario, Tuesday, July 10, 2012. BlackBerry suffered an embarrassing outage affecting users in Europe, Middle East and Africa on Friday, interrupting service for customers as Apple's hot new iPhone 5 was available in stores. (THE CANADIAN PRESS/Dave Chidley) | CP

"This is not a piece of news that they can afford, they need or they want at this time," said Doradla, who's based in Chicago.

RIM's next-generation BlackBerry 10 smartphones won't make their debut until early next year, missing this year's holiday sales season. The new phones were supposed to launch last year giving the Waterloo, Ont., company few new products to sell.

"With every passing quarter that they delay the launch of the new product, they continue to lose market share," Doradla said.

The BlackBerry outage affected email and text users in Europe, the Middle East and Africa for a maximum of three hours, RIM chief executive Thorsten Heins said in a statement.

"I want to apologize to those BlackBerry customers in Europe and Africa who experienced an impact in their quality of service earlier this morning," Heins said.

Heins, who noted no data or messages were lost, said RIM was looking into the problem and would report the results of its investigation.

Up to six per cent of RIM's user base may have been impacted, Heins estimated.

"Preliminary analysis suggests that those customers may have experienced a maximum delay of three hours in the delivery and reception of their messages," he said.

RIM announced the BlackBerry outage in postings on Facebook and Twitter before the business day got fully under way in North America.

Shares in Research In Motion narrowly missed hitting a new one-year low on Friday. Shares were down 7.4 per cent, or 50 cents, closing at $6.25, coming within a penny of a 52-week low of $6.24 set on Sept. 6.

The stock has taken a beating as RIM's product lineup falls behind rival products, particularly the iPhones from Apple and Galaxy devices from Samsung.

RIM has been making cuts across its operations to help counter faltering sales of its smartphones, particularly in North America. The company announced 5,000 layoffs earlier this year.

The outage also brought up unpleasant memories of troubles with email and chat messages last year that left millions of users globally without service for three days. At that time, RIM was criticized for being slow to respond publicly to the outage.